Page 11 of Waves
“Bah! Eat. I’ve got some fried cockroaches in my bag somewhere. She’ll be fine,” Lizza pronounced.
“How about I meet you in ten minutes outside the circle of tents?” I proposed a compromise, mostly because I planned on gorging myself so that none of those cockroaches came anywhere near my lips.
“That will work,” Posey answered for them, ignoring Lizza’s glare. “We’ll go set up.”
The two of them wandered off as my men came and encased me on either side. Mateo immediately put my arm into the crook of his elbow, but Felipe merely hovered close, studying my face for signs of exhaustion.
“I’m alright. I promise,” I told him, reaching out and taking his rough palm with mine. He immediately gave my hand a squeeze. “How are you?”
“Those bastards need to stop.” Felipe’s dark growl shouldn’t have been attractive, but it was. It sent a thrill up my spine as we stared at one another, dark heat banked in the navy depths of his eyes, his scars gleaming dangerously in the light.
Somehow, I knew that this hardened guard wouldn’t be afraid of my dark side when it appeared. He wouldn’t shy away from it, just as he didn’t shy away from any danger. He rode the line between honorable and violent…and I hoped he’d help keep me right there with him.
Our shared fury at the rebels mounted and the tension between us heightened until his anger mutated into something wilder. More feral. Something we unfortunately didn’t have time for because Lizza wouldn’t give a damn about privacy.
Instead of leaning in and taking his lips like I wanted, I simply murmured a promise. “We’ll find them.”
“But how?” Mateo asked the question none of us had dared to voice, shattering the momentum that had built between Felipe and me. Shattering my confidence.
Turning to my other mer mate, I hated that I had to answer, “I don’t know.”
Chapter 6
Avia
“Again!” Lizza commanded, her yell scratching at my eardrums.
We were out in the open ocean far beyond the tent ring and peering eyes and I was doing horribly.
I wanted to fling my face hard into a bit of coral reef off to my right and hope something poisonous lurked within it.
In my left hand, I gripped a stone spear. For inspiration, Lizza had said. My other palm was empty and open, but it was the more weighed down, aching, because magical exhaustion was heavier than any weapon.
But I lifted my right hand and closed my eyes for the millionth time, trying to fill myself with the song of the sea.
The notes were faint. Distant. Nothing like they’d been during the attack. Not even like they were during the parade. They were so far away. Pinpricks of sound.
Desperation threatened…but emotion would derail me.
Get it together, Avia,I scolded, pulling in deep breaths and trying to force myself into a state of calm. I tried to channel Bloss and her confidence. That bold determination she always seemed to give off. The oldest sibling entitlement.
You are mine,I told the ocean.
The notes sounded a little less hesitant. A bit louder.
Another breath and then there were harps and vielle strings vibrating through the water.
My fingers curled and magic pulled at me. I tried to imagine my body as a forge as Lizza had suggested, a place where the raw magic was formed and shaped. Weaponized.
An ice ball dropped from my hand, clattering down onto the pile of the hundred I’d already made.
“Dammit!” In frustration, I lobbed the spear at the ground, sending up a flurry of ocean sand and forcing a tiny crab to scuttle for cover.
I was not improving.
Posey lifted her vine-like fingers to her lips and called out helpfully, “You know, if we got the right court painter, they'd be able to transform those ice balls into skulls, so it looked like you were hovering over the skulls of your enemies.” Of course, she’d mention skulls. Half the skin around her lower lips was gone and her own skeleton peeked out eerily.
Lifting my arms, I tried to blast her with cold water for impertinence, but another ice ball, this one smaller than all the rest, simply formed between my hands like a child’s snowball on land. “Sard it all! Nothing’s working.”
